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Pat Buchannan read "Camp of the Saints" and mentions it in this book. That explains the eerie resemblence between that astringent work of fiction and Buchannan's thesis: The West is under attack, from without by immigration, and from within by its' own elites. The birthrate numbers that Buchannan uses are unnerving, and are well-documented, and in line with other works ("Grey Dawn") that examine population trends. Western (including Russian and Japanese) women are not having enough babies to maintain population levels. The result; Florida is the model of the society of the future. For Italy, it is the present. Geriatric societies are not working or fighting societies, and the day will come when unassimilated immigrant workers will tire of caring for and supporting with their taxes old white people. If not, the grandchildren of the Boomer generation will foot a tremendous bill for their care. "Pay As You Go" Social Security financing virtually guarantees intergenerational conflict, a subject Mr. Buchannan mentions only in passing. Prophetically, he notes that illegal aliens in the US roughly equal in number the Americans aborted since Roe V. Wade. As we choose voluntary extinction, others will take our place at the table. That said, I have to question the longer-term population projections given. They are of the nature of, "if present trends continue for 50 or 100 years..." One thing that we can be sure of is that present trends will not continue. If they did, Islam, in retreat abroad and attacked by secular modernists like Attaturk within, would still be on the defensive, for example. Thus, straight-line popluation projections detract from the argument; to imaging Iran or Egypt with nearly 100 million people assumes that water, warfare, and germs do not limit the population explosion, and that prosperity, if it comes, will not lower birthrates there as it does here. The second front chronicled by Mr. Buchannan is the internal assault upon the foundations of Western culture. It is not capitalism that is their primary target, but Christianity, and the culture begotten of it over two millenia that the leftists have steadily undermined. The consequence of this, he argues, is that the vital energy of our peoples are sapped, and they lose the will to live, including the desire to reproduce, since the meaning of life escapes them. As the Christian Culture of Life withers, it is supplanted by the Culture of Death, manifesting itself in casual sex, abortion, euthenasia, and a general disrespect for the sanctity of life. (Human life, that is. Snail darters are still sacred.) Much of the book is a litany of current events recalled to support the author's position. They are so fresh that the book could have scarcly been finished before Thanksgiving. September 11th is here, and an analysis of the anti-Western response. So is the Bush Administration's confirmation battle over John Ashcroft, the NAACP's infamous James Byrd ads, the Boy Scout controversy, et cterea. The book is a little long on examples to support the main argument, which is quite simple: a movement, not a conspiracy per se, has been systematically working to take over the megaphones of Western, especially American, society: TV, movies, radio, newspapers, schools, pulpits, colleges, government. Having gained control of what Richard Weaver called "The Great Stereopticon" ("Ideas Have Consequences"), they have relentlessly told us that the US is wholly evil, racist, genocidal, and that we bear the burden of that guilt. This low-grade brain-washing has succeeded, as most good ad campaigns do, in convincing our children that they should hate the country that we grew up loving, and that it isn't worth fighting for. Thus, as the forces of the '60s advance, Christians and their allies are under siege in the "Camp of the Saints," as each redout falls to a fresh onslaught. Mr. Buchannan closes with some suggestions for combatting the spread of the new religion, but they do not amount to the galvanizing call to action that I hoped for. Perhaps the pessemism that prevades the book reflects his own doubt as to a successful outcome. If Hillaire Belloc is right, then the struggle for revolutionising society takes about three generations to decide, as yesterday's counterculture becomes today's cutting edge, tommorrow's current wisdom, and what it replaces becomes, in turn, the counterculture. As there are no lost causes, so there are no won causes, and Mr. Buchannan's book, which is conciously Catholic, lacks, in the end, the assurance that God will win in the end, with or without the West. -Lloyd A. Conway